Shabana Haydar
Computer- aided technology is now increasingly being used in many schools to improve the teaching – learning process and to connect the school curriculum to a child’s lived experience. Yet, the question remains, is the potential of technology being fully tapped? This article is based on an ongoing research work on the use of ICT in schools in Kolkata and provides some interesting findings on the recent trends and dominant features in the use of ICT in school education.

Manas Paul
What is a logic gate especially where computers are concerned? A logic gate is an elementary building block of a digital circuit. Any arithmetic operation in a computer system can be implemented using basic logical operations. Three of the most common logical operations are NOT, OR and AND. Our phones have thousands, if not millions of logic gates. Everything from the CPU to the display screen to power management and alarm works on logic gates.

Subha Das Mollick
Did you know that the blueprint for a universal machine, one which had the simplest computing model and was powerful enough to calculate all possible functions was developed by Alan Turing, an English mathematician, logician and computer scientist? Turing showed that by inserting different programs in the memory of what he called the Universal Turing Machine, a computer could be made to carry out any task for which a program could be written. Today, we can see that Turing’s idea of a one-stop computing machine that can carry out multiple tasks was revolutionary.

Sudipto Bhattacharya and Subha Das Mollick
The earliest computers were programmed without a programming language. The languages were mostly codes based on decimal or binary systems. The next step was to devise a system to feed data into the computers. This was done through punched cards using Jacquard’s loom. The next big leap came in the early 20th century when the programming codes began to take the form of a language. The 1950s and 1960s saw the flowering of some of the modern languages like Fortran, Cobol and Basic that are still in use today. As of now, the evolution of programming languages continues both in industry as well as in research.